Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  At the committal poor old Charlie inevitably got drunk and fell into his wife’s grave. For the Twins this was their father’s final, unforgivable disgrace, and when he himself died of grief a few months later neither of the Twins applied for permission to attend his funeral.

  Once again the Twins’ had their photographs in all the papers. They now knew for certain that they were not forgotten, and it wasn’t long before they started to create one of the most successful and outrageous publicity campaigns ever mounted by a pair of murderers in captivity.

  From the start they realised that, whatever happened, they needed to stay firmly in the public eye. At that moment there was little that Reg could do about this from his cell in Parkhurst, but for Ron the situation was completely different and in Broadmoor, with unrestricted access to the press, he was in his element. He enjoyed talking to journalists and made it clear that he expected to be paid for interviews, which brought him in extremely useful sums of money. By early 1983 Ron had started a press campaign to reinvent himself and Reg as East End heroes. He did this by shifting all the blame for their murders onto their victims. He told a reporter from the Daily Star that ‘George Cornell had just been vermin. He was less than nothing, and I reckon that we did society and the East End in particular a favour by getting rid of him.’ Similarly, Jack the Hat was ‘nothing more than a drunken slag and a danger to decent women’.

  Then Reg joined in to spread the word that, apart from doing a public service by killing characters like Jack the Hat, the Twins genuinely had hearts of gold. In the press he’d read about a fourteen-year-old boy in Liverpool who was fighting for his life against a rare brain disease, and Reg started his own campaign to spread the message by publicly sending money to children he had read about in the newspapers who were sick or dying. He would also include a personal note of encouragement with their cheque, and welcomed the subsequent publicity.

  Then Reg realised that there was yet another way to keep the Kray name in the news. Many convicted murderers attract fan mail from lonely women, and Ron and Reg were no exception, often receiving more than twenty letters in a week. Their stories of romance in prison always appealed to the press. For the sake of publicity, Reg became engaged twice, but Ron decided to take this one step further. He would actually get married in Broadmoor. For some time he had been receiving the most romantic letters from a lonely divorced mother of two called Elaine Mildener. He proposed to her and she accepted. In fact Ron had already made a deal with a reporter for the exclusive rights to the story of his Broadmoor marriage for £6,000.

  But the new Mrs Kray rapidly discovered that, far from offering her any of the normal joys of marriage, her chief job was to take the place of Violet, washing his shirts, bringing in food and drink from Harrods and becoming his general dogsbody.

  This meant that, as well as earning Ron a lot of money, marriage brought a considerable improvement to his quality of life in Broadmoor. According to one journalist, ‘tonight Ron Kray will have smoked salmon for his supper, together with thinly sliced brown bread and his favourite Normandy butter, all delivered specially from Harrods, the top peoples’ store.’

  The truth was that by now the Twins’ days of crime were really over. Instead they had become professional criminal celebrities whose lives were now completely dedicated to exploiting the apparently endless public interest in themselves and the utterly engrossing story of their lives.

  At the same time, outside prison their brother Charlie had spotted the business opportunities offered by the name of Kray and founded a company called Krayleigh which sold Kray T-shirts nationwide at £7.50 each. With the Kray name still behind him he of course had the market to himself and would-be competitors were soon warned off

  On one visit Charlie brought in a friend of his Wilf Pine, recently returned from America, to visit Ron. It was unbelievable that no one at Broadmoor seemed to know that this charming fellow with a beard knew almost every leading member of the American Mafia.

  This of course impressed Ron enormously, and he grew to respect Wilf for many reasons, not least for his connections with the Mafia. At the same time, Wilf summed up Ron as ‘ the smartest madman I have ever met’ and a close and very profitable friendship followed.

  Nobody objected when Wilf started visiting Ron in Broadmoor almost every day, and the man from the Mafia effectively became his business manager. The two of them realised that a lot of money could be made, not only in fees from journalists, but by effectively franchising the name of Kray throughout the country. In return for a hefty fee, security firms and gaming clubs would once again be protected by the name of Kray. For the first time since they were sent to prison the Twins started to become seriously rich.

  But throughout the eighties the Twins’ most ambitious financial coup of all continued to elude them – that all-important film about their lives which, when they had murdered Jack the Hat, they thought would bring them immortality.

  At one stage the pop star Roger Daltry was apparently planning a £4 million film about the Twins, and just before Richard Burton died he too visited Ron in Broadmoor to discuss yet another film.

  But in the end it was Wilf Pine, the Englishman from the Mafia, who would put a deal together with a small company called Parkway Films to make a film about the Twins starring Martin and Gary Kemp, two members of the pop group known as Spandau Ballet. And although the film went on to gross over £10 million, the Twins and Charlie had to share £750,000. Inevitably a family row followed when brother Charlie somehow got the lion’s share, and they didn’t speak to one another for several years.

  When compared with the real story of the Twins, the film was deeply disappointing, but for the Twins it did two things: it made them even richer than before and it glamorised them more than ever.

  With so much going on and, having by now divorced Elaine, Ron could not resist the excitement of marrying once more. He was determined not to make the same mistakes twice and this time chose someone the exact opposite of Elaine to be his bride.

  When he met Kate Howerd at Broadmoor he knew at once that she was more his type. She was a pretty, fun-loving former kiss-a-gram and at their very first meeting he asked her to marry him. In spite of the fact that Ron made it clear from the start that sex was not included in the deal, Kate accepted his proposal. This was another wedding aimed at increasing the Twins’ publicity still further. To start with, Kate went along with everything very happily. She bought herself a lovely dress and, at Ron’s request, ordered the wedding breakfast from Harrods. Since Lord Snowdon had refused the honour of taking the bride’s wedding portrait, Kate made do with the Queen’s cousin Lord Lichfield instead. Ron hired a white Rolls Royce driven by a Broadmoor nurse wearing a peaked cap as her chauffeur, to bring Kate to the wedding in the Broadmoor chapel, where Reg had been brought across from Parkhurst to act as his best man. Ron had also promised Kate several things, including a house in the country, which never materialised, and before long, like the first Mrs Ron she discovered that her marital duties consisted largely of shopping and running errands for her husband. Luckily for Kate she had a good sense of humour, which she was going to need before the marriage ended.

  Meanwhile life was getting easier all the time for Reg. Not only was he now allowed to visit Ron once a month, but he was finally moved to the more tolerant atmosphere of Maidstone Prison, where he soon became the most indulged and privileged high security prisoner in the country.

  Their biggest asset would always be the name of Kray, but now it was backed up with endless money and wall-to-wall publicity. From the moment Reg arrived at Maidstone the other prisoners were in awe of him. A new governor had been recently appointed to replace the harsh prison discipline of the past with a more liberal regime, and since Reg made no trouble, and made sure that those around him made no trouble either, everyone including the Governor was happy. And with all his money Reg had no difficulty persuading members of the prison staff to get him almost anything he wanted, including the most att
ractive fellow prisoner to share his cell. During his time in prison, Reg had already had several male lovers but it was in Maidstone that he met the last male lover in his life who would be there for him until he died. This was a willowy, handsome would-be gangster called Bradley Allardyce, whose speciality was robbing post-offices

  Only the Twins could have ever got away with what they did. The skill and the effrontery with which both of them had bucked the system reminded me in a way of those eighteen months in the early 1950s when, as young conscripts, they took the British army for a ride during their so-called military service with the Royal Fusiliers, and Ron had had his first experience of acting like a madman.

  But by this point time and cigarettes were catching up with Ron. Lively Kate had made it clear that, unlike the first Mrs Ronald Kray, she had no intention of accepting too much nonsense and she was getting bored with running non-stop errands back and forth to Broadmoor. The press was now on to everything they did or said, and when Kate published a book about their marriage, Ron was deeply upset and felt that he was being victimised and made to look a fool.

  It was now that Ron took offence one morning when another patient smiled at him at breakfast and tried to strangle him. Luckily the nurses stopped him, but the incident left Ron more depressed than ever. Then Kate said she wanted a divorce.

  By now Ron was pushing sixty and in a state of almost permanent depression, and the life suddenly appeared to go out of him. The man who was once the most feared criminal in the whole of London actually complained to Wilf Pine that two of the male nurses were bullying him. Taking things into his own hands, Wilf ambushed the two nurses outside the local pub where they used to drink and threatened them with bloody murder if they didn’t treat Ron with respect. The bullying ceased, but it was not long after this that Ron was taken ill and rushed by ambulance to Wexham Hospital near Broadmoor. There he died of a sudden heart attack on 16 March 1995.

  It is said that when he heard the news Reg went crazy. No one in Maidstone could control him and the governor ordered his entire landing to be locked up to stop the violence spreading. By now Reg’s lover, Bradley Allardyce, had been shifted to another prison, and one gets some idea of the power Reg Kray wielded inside the prison from the fact that Bradley was instantly transferred back to Maidstone as he was the only person who could console him.

  Calm now that he had Bradley with him, Reg realised what he had to do. He was now sole keeper of the the legend that he and Ron had spent so much of their lives creating, and it was his duty to give Ron a worthy send-off.

  When he had organised Frances’s funeral all those years before he had been desperate to make it ‘the East End’s funeral of the year.’ Now he was even more desperate to turn Ron’s departure into the East End’s funeral to end all funerals.

  I’ve often wondered how Reg put together such a complex operation from inside prison. Certainly only someone in his privileged position could have managed it. He modelled it partly on the traditional Mafia funerals he’d read so much about, and also on the state funeral of Ron’s old hero, Winston Churchill. Above all, it must also be an East End funeral with the traditional black plumed horses to pull the hearse, several hundred dedicated minders in black overcoats to line the route and twenty-five gleaming limousines for those who mourned.

  Among the wreaths, there were two from America. One was from the Twins’ only serious contender in the celebrity stakes for murder, the U.S. Mafia don John Gotti, who was also in prison; and the other was from Wilf Pine’s friends, the Pagano crime family of New York. But the wreath that everyone noticed was the one from Reg. Spelled out in a huge arrangement of blood red roses on a background of white chrysanthemums and fixed to Ron’s coffin was an inscription that said it all: ‘TO RON, MY OTHER HALF’.

  Now that the lifelong battle for supremacy between the Twins was over Reg became more of a conscious celebrity than ever, and their legend now depended entirely on him.

  He had long ago given up denying his sexuality and now admitted that he was bisexual. Like some doting father he had married Bradley off to a pretty girl called Donna Baker. Reg had chosen her from one of the many girls who visited him regularly in Prison, and this suited him because he too was set on marriage.

  His bride to be was Roberta Jones a thirty-six year-old English graduate from Southport Manchester. Reg had come into contact with her when her company was making a video of Ron’s funeral. Their marriage took place in Maidstone Prison on 14 July 1997. Bradley Allardyce was his best man. But unlike Ron’s last marriage, this was a much more low-key ceremony and although it hit the headlines in the next day’s newspapers he was not allowed to make any money, even from selling the wedding photographs to the press.

  Unlike any other Mrs Kray, Roberta was utterly devoted to Reg and since he had nearly served the full thirty years that Melford Stevenson had reccomended, she campaigned tirelessly for his parole. Had Reg been an ordinary murderer convicted of a gangland killing he would almost certainly have been released long ago by now. The unofficial ‘tariff’ for murder at the time was twelve-and-a-half years in prison. But by making himself the country’s top criminal celebrity, Reg had made himself too hot for any Home Secretary to handle and no politically conscious politician, like the current Home Secretary Jack Straw, could ever have recommended the most notorious murderer in the country for release.

  *

  Then in April 2000 Charlie died. He had been caught in what looked like a fairly obvious police trap for allegedly dealing in £2 million worth of cocaine. He had served out his last days in Parkhurst and his final wish was to be buried in peace with a minimum of fuss. But Charlie was more useful to his brother Reg dead than alive, and although Charlie was the least important of the three Kray brothers, his funeral gave Reg the chance to stage the greatest full-scale celebration of the ever-growing legend of the Twins with Reg himself now firmly in the centre.

  Some said that there were twenty thousand people in Whitechapel High Street on that March morning, but I would guess that it was twice that number. With police everywhere and their helicopters circling overhead, the old East End had never seen the like of it before.

  When the unmarked van bringing Reg from Bellmarsh Prison drew up outside English’s funeral parlour and Reg stepped out, handcuffed this time to a female warder, there was a huge roar of applause from the crowds outside, many of whom had not even been born when the Twins were arrested, and fewer still had ever met them.

  This was to be Reg’s last public appearance and in its strange way it was a profoundly emotional occasion. Although he didn’t know it yet, Reg too was dying and he could never have expected such a heartfelt demonstration of warmth and affection as he received that day. It ended in Chingford cemetery where, after kissing Frances’s tombstone, he stood alone by Charlie’s grave while Freddy Foreman called for three cheers for Reggie Kray. Then in the silence that followed the last of the Krays stepped into the unmarked van that would drive him back to Wayland Prison outside Norwich.

  It was unfortunate for Reg that the only one of these three epic funerals that he was unable to appreciate was his own. For the last two years he’d been complaining of painful indigestion and the prison doctors had told him there was nothing wrong and insisted on giving him Milk of Magnesia. In fact he was suffering from advanced stomach cancer and the disease had spread. In spite of an operation in which the surgeons removed a large growth from his stomach, they could not save him. But it was only when the doctors could assure Jack Straw that Reg was safely on the point of dying that the Home Secretary granted him his last few days of freedom.

  Reg and Roberta spent their last few weeks together in freedom in the honeymoon suite in a small hotel with a view across the river. It had been paid for by Reg’s old friend Bill Curbishley and, as Reg lay dying, Bradley and Roberta shared the death-bed vigil.

  But to the very last Reg’s thoughts were on his precious legend. As a thank you to Curbishley, Reg had given him the TV rights to a final
deathbed interview. Reg was close to death by now and looked like it, but the interviewer, Aubrey Powell, said that he had one last question that he really wanted Reg to answer.

  ‘Do you regret killing Jack the Hat?’ he asked him. Reg shook his head.

  ‘Then why did you kill him ?’ Powell insisted.

  Reg paused a while before he answered.

  ‘I killed him because he was a vexation to the Spirit,’ he whispered.

  Reg died a few days later, but even in death there was no escaping from the bond that had always tied him to his twin, and his coffin was placed next to Ron’s in the double grave in Kray Corner, with Frances in her grave beside them.

  But the Twins’ true memorial was their precious legend, which they had killed for and suffered for and which, with Reg’s death, was even more alive than ever.

  Appendix

  During the year between the Twins’ arrest in 1968 and the conclusion of their Old Bailey trial a year later Ron wrote me many letters from prison. Some were about the progress of the biography I was writing with him and Reg, some about his hopes for the future and others about the celebrities who came to visit him in prison.